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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Peak Oil -
  • Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:29:34 -0500

Marjory wrote:

Perhaps Toby, in your experience growing food is easy. And I am finding
after years of working very hard and making many, many mistakes, it is
getting easier. but by no means is it as easy as it was presented in the pc
course. It is damned hard work and a difficult apprenticship which takes
about a decade going at it with everything you have. And then you are just
a beginner. I can't tell you how much I've seen die, how many designs I've
built that didn't work or fit thier intended purpose, so many ideas that
sounded so good when we were all in a circle singing and holding hands in
class. The mistakes and losses are a harsh teacher. Yes, I took a pc
course with an internationally known teacher, yes, I've studied as much as I
can, yes, I've put every spare moment I can into the project. Yes, some
things are working. I've visited almost all of the precious few local
farmers who actually produce food for a living. I have visited almost
everyone who even attempts sustainability. There aren't that many real
examples of a sustainable food produciton system where someone is actually
living off of it. There are a handful acattered about the country (USA).
All of them took years to develop.
Our food forest in Santa Rosa, CA did not get to the point where we were actually living off of it. It was going to where we were going to have fruit and berries enough to trade for whatever else we needed to eat, though. I had not even got started on the market garden piece of the design, with the farm stand out on a busy street, Mountain View Avenue. In another couple of years, we would have been in great shape. But we had shitty neighbors all around us. No community. I don't know what you're doing, but it doesn't match my experience at all. With sheet mulching and drip irrigation, adobe soil, swaled and bermed, grew anything we planted. I suspect that my next food growing endeavor will take place where SFRs once stood in Austin proper. Toby's sustainable urban situation seems to center on SFRs but I don't see how, with the energy waste involved. Mild climate will be essential for SFRs to remain in the landscape, unless they're straw bale or Earthships or some other super insulated structure. The ecocity center uses a lot of common walls, so energy as heat is used over and over and over before escaping, the same way that water is, in a good functioning Permaculture design.
30% of current energy expenditure is invested in shitting in the drinking water then trying to clean it up so the next person will drink it. We must complete the cycle and return human wastes to the land. We know how to do this safely with composting toilets, but most people in the US don't yet even admit they shit.
I don't think it is realistic to talk about an eco-village or city unless
you address food and water. So many people focus on the straw bale houses
or the solar panels - what will they eat?
This is accurate, I think. Food and water has to be provided for in the early design. An ecocity moves SFR folks into ecocity centers, strips their houses, and reclaims the farmland or forest they sit on. Any properly designed ecocity structure harvests rain water from all possible surfaces, filters it, and provides high quality water to the community. Ecocity structures also provide growing areas in many spots not generally thought of in conventional architecture. I don't see sixty story straw bale ecocity center structures. I see papercrete being viable in some applications.
Tommy, I was reading the president of the Texas Organic Famres Assoc. say
that there isn't enough locally grown food in the entire Dallas area to
supply even one elementary school with produce for lunch. It is also true
for most of the Texas counties.
I believe this. You can't grow organic on soil that's been chemically treated in the last four or five years. It won't grow anything worth eating until the damage is repaired with mulch and compost and perhaps amendments, if you guess correctly what the soil microorganisms require for a resurgence, or if you know to get your soil tested to see what it needs. Texas went conventional at some point, with huge farms growing monocrops, using soil to produce crops from petrochemicals. It has not recovered, and we are in a terrifying position, considering there is twenty years of oil left in the Earth and Texas Aggies run the TX Department of Agriculture.
Very few of the pc teachers in the Austin area produce much of thier own
food - and many of them produce none and never have. They simply repeat
Mollison, show the Global Gardener, and assume that little detail of eating
is handled.
The Permaculture teachers in the Austin area remain mysterious to me. I don't know what any of them do, or don't do. I only know that there are a lot of people going in what I consider to be the wrong direction, considering what the near term looks like. Eating may not be everything, but when you're hungry, nothing else happens, after a while. Green building may make us feel good, but it does nothing to change settlement patterns that don't work in the Post-Oil landscape. Denial is the name of the game here, it seems to me. I think nothing but nature should be allowed to exist for three hundred feet on either side of a riparian corridor. I think wildlife corridors should go through Austin. I think the SFR should go the way of the dodo. I think we should abandon the car now, and build lives around what results from that, so that we are fairly well situated for the Post-Oil landscape. I think we should require business to meet us in our lives, rather than forcing us to conform to business needs. I think locals should have absolute local control over urban planning and development. I think a lot of stuff that seems to be anathema to supposed PC folks in Austin. But I have three degrees from New College of California, a movement school for more than thirty years. It's a stretch to call the local Permaculture listserve tame. It has to get some life to achieve tame. We're talking cadaver-like. But I'm living in an apartment, buying all my food, writing a novel, being nuts, observing.
Isn't it correct that prior to the use of fossil feuls (say before 1880 or
os) that 95% of the population was involved in agriculture? Most of the
population was involved in producing food. Those people were just as
intelligent and capable as we are today - perhaps moreso. Yes, indigenous
groups who didn't go into ag had a much easier lifestyle, but they also had
a much more fetile land to roam on than we do today.
Petrochemical corporations didn't discover PR firms until after WWII. After they could clean up their images without cleaning up their acts, they ran roughshod over farmers, selling them chemicals that killed their soil and bankrupted them.
Smiles.
Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX




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